Out of War

Out of War draws on Mariane C. Ferme’s three decades of ethnographic engagements to examine the physical and psychological aftereffects of the harms of Sierra Leone's civil war. Ferme analyzes the relationship between violence, trauma, and the political imagination, focusing on “war times”—the different qualities of temporality arising from war. She considers the persistence of precolonial and colonial figures of sovereignty re-elaborated in the context of war, and the circulation of rumors and neologisms that freeze in time collective anxieties linked to particular phases of the conflict (or “chronotopes”). Beyond the expected traumas of war, Ferme explores the breaks in the intergenerational transmission of farming and hunting techniques, and the lethal effects of remembering experienced traumas and forgetting local knowledge. In the context of massive population displacements and humanitarian interventions, this ethnography traces strategies of survival and material dwelling, and the juridical creation of new figures of victimhood, where colonial and postcolonial legacies are reinscribed in neoliberal projects of decentralization and individuation.

Mariane C. Ferme is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone. 

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
War Times and Forms of Life
1 Belatedness 39
Vision, Writing, and the Labor of Time
Chronotope 1: Prefiguring Shifting Alliances—The Sobel 69
2 Wartime Rumors 74
Red Cross as Rebel Cross and Other Figures of the Collective Imagination
Chronotope 2: Numbers, Examples, and Exceptions 98
3 Hunters, Warriors, and Their Technologies 110
4 Sitting on the Land 147
The Political and Symbolic Economy of the Chieftaincy
5 Refugees and Diasporic Publics 171
The Territorial State Reconfigured
6 Child Soldiers and the Contested Imaginary of Community after War 198
7 Forced Marriage and Sexual Enslavement 218
Debating Consent, Custom, and the Law at the Special Court for Sierra Leone
8 Inscriptions on the Wall 237
Chinese Material Traces in the Landscape
Conclusion 256
Surviving and Moving On—Ephemeral Returns
Notes 267
References 283